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by Rjevski 2877 days ago
Scraping is not unethical IMO. If you make the data public then everyone has the right to use it for whatever reason.

Arbitrarily restricting what the data can be used for is what I would call unethical.

1 comments

Scraping becomes unethical when it turns into a DOS, doesn't it? In some cases it wouldn't be an issue, but some scraping definitely makes the service less responsive.
Yep, this is the only thing which I agree with. When I scrape I always try to use as little resources as possible and make sure it’s appropriate for the size of the site I’m scraping (I wouldn’t care about sending 1k requests/second to Facebook, but wouldn’t send more than a dozen few per second to a little e-commerce store).